Kampala, Uganda. -- Though its AIDS-infection rate is one of the highest in the world, Uganda is hailed by development experts for its stability and growth potential. AIDS now claims as many lives as Uganda's internal wars did a decade ago, yet the urban economy -- stagnant during the war years -- is now thriving.
At the heart of this paradox lies a new developmental phenomenon: The village is transforming the city in Uganda, reversing the West's traditional development process of modernization through urbanization. The phenomenon is particularly evident here in Uganda's capital, where radio stations broadcast funeral announcements almost non-stop, yet handsome middle-class houses are going up everywhere and even the poorest neighborhood has a bustling market and the poorest family has a tiny shop.
Agriculture constitutes the largest single economic sector in Kampala and the key factor behind its energy and take-off spirit. Some 36 percent of the city's one-million-plus residents practice some form of farming, according to Ndyakira Amooti, a writer for the country's leading daily newspaper New Vision. He estimates that almost half the city's land is devoted to farming, which now produces some 20 percent of the entire city's food needs. Ninety percent of all poultry, the city's chief source of meat, is produced within city limits.
The economic incentive for such activity is obvious: If a family in the city has a plot of land to farm, either there or in the countryside, and can sell its products in street-side stalls, it can not only feed itself but generate enough of a livelihood to improve its children's opportunities.
But Ugandans have also discovered that extending the village into the city through farming offers them a way to struggle through their own personal AIDS crisis and that of the country as a whole. Farming reinforces urban dwellers' ties to family and land -- the two anchors that ensure survival against the ravages of AIDS.
In this country of 17 million, at least 1.5 million are orphans -- once the result of internal war, now the result of AIDS killing their parents. Godfrey Ssewankambo, of the Ugandan Woman's Effort to Save Orphans, notes that the key to saving these children is linking them to their communities, often in rural areas, and connecting them to plots that by inheritance are legitimately theirs. Working and selling the produce of their own land with the aid of clansmen distracts them from grief and helps them support themselves until they are ready to begin their own families.
Along with orphans, some 50 to 60 percent of Kampala's middle class depends on farming, according to Mr. Amooti. But the chief beneficiaries of merging the village with the city are the urban poor. While middle-class Kamapalans constantly complain of feeling wiped out by price increases, the poor cushion themselves by growing what they eat. Some 70 percent of what they produce they themselves consume. The remaining 30 percent they sell in the tiny shops and markets that proliferate throughout the city. When overall prices go up, they simply adjust their own prices upward.
In a country where more than 90 percent of the population remains rural, the back-and-forth movement of people between village and city, generated by urban farming, helps draw the villages closer into the modern world. It is also creating, Mr. Amooti writes in New Vision, a Ugandan version of the Chinese city that produces all its vegetable needs.
But while in China it is economic opportunity that has catalyzed the new "village- ization" of city life, in Uganda it is AIDS. More than anything else, AIDS has forced Ugandans to look to their traditional villages not as burdens they have to shake off in order to achieve modernization but as an economically viable way to save the next generation of children.
Franz Schurmann, professor emeritus of history and sociology at the University of California, is in East Africa researching new forms of social capital for the U.N. Development Program and for a forthcoming book.